“The Portrait”

Huxley’s message of this story is to not let others mock you, you should be well-educated and open-minded person, what should give a person independence and confidence. At the beginning of the story we see how easily Mr. Bigger sneers at frivolous and arrogant customer. He tells him obvious ironies, makes the Lord of the Manor dance after his pipe and disports himself with telling him a false story about the cheap picture looking like a piece of Venetian Masters of the 18th century. Another victim of Mr. Bigger is a poor young artist, who painted this picture. He is rather clever boy, but he is also as ingenuous as the customer is. Mr. Bigger sells his picture for such a high price, but gives him practically nothing for his work. From this story it is clear, that you should be smart and careful if you want to be prosperous. The main hero of the story is Mr. Bigger. It is an ingenious art-dealer who perfectly knows how to sell and what to sell. His main interest is money, what can be seen from his thoughts about the reason of his customer’s material welfare, asking a high price for the picture and his fraud at the artist. His name itself reflects his behavior towards the customer, showing us a person, who knows everything and who can give a proper advice. Mr. Bigger produces an impression of a reliable person and the customer easily falls for this impression.
The most interesting thing about this story is the dealer’s tactics, which shows us a brilliant psychological skill of Huxley to portrait the personages’ inner world and the process of communication sidewise. The story can be divided into several stages. First stage describes us how Mr. Bigger evaluates a customer from the first sight. The author inputs the dealer’s thoughts indirectly. The next step in Mr. Bigger’s strategy is an agreement to everything what the customer says, to make the Lord of the Manor feel what he wants – superiority. To produce such impression, Mr. Bigger uses flattering and tries to make the customer feel comfortable. The next stage is the penultimate episode of clearing all the consumer’s doubts. To achieve this goal, the dealer sublimates the consumer’s fine art instinct. In the last stage he led the consumer to the apogee of the despair, what is shown with the help of the phraseological unit “burst into tears”. Now Mr. Bigger wants to produce the opposite effect, conceding that the consumer is quite intelligenced in art. This is a flat flattering. But that helps the consumer to “feel himself on safer ground” and more important.
The Lord of the Manor wants a historical piece of art. And a sly art-dealer invents such story just on the fly, like a fairy-tale for children at night. He speaks very confident, calm, serious, on a low voice. All that makes an effect of the picture’s significance. He doesn’t hurry, making pauses to whiff to produce an impression of luxury and to make the consumer feel suspense, leading the consumer deeper and deeper in lies, love and history. The final stage is the purchase. After convincing the customer that this picture is exactly what he needs and that he has wonderful gift of “natural instinct”, tactical Mr. Bigger celebrated his triumph.This story is told in rather optimistic tone, with raft of ironical notes. But the thing which Huxley showed in the story is rather tragic. We see two awfully selfish people with money as the highest value. Nor customer, neither dealer has that special sense of art tingle as the real artist has when he makes an oeuvre. Both men are not sincere and conformable. They will never tell you if they are wrong. Because the superiority is put higher than the truth, humanism or the aesthetic sensitivity. Huxley always tried to criticize and ridicule such people and such society even in his very first essays. But it is very sad, that after reading this story people continue lying, pretending, playing a double game and making tricks and frauds at each other. This leads the society to degradation and makes people suffer. But who ever tried to listen to the poets or to the artists? We trust only to prophets and to politics allowing them to make us blind, not-available to think and analyze, to make serious decisions and actions stupid crowd.